Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Fishing Expedition

If I’ve been quite, it’s for lack of desire to keep beating around the bush, but the coincidence of these two articles from Discovery.com were too good to pass up for a littoralist such as myself. Bolstering the argument that humans evolved on the shoreline, this from “Neanderthal Greek Paradise Found” (May 22, 2013) by Jennifer Viegas:

“The Neanderthals seemed to have a particular fondness for tortoise meat. The shells -- from shellfish too -- mostly were all recycled into tools, such as implements for scraping.…

“Dental wear suggests that the Neanderthals enjoyed a varied diet consisting of seafood, meat, and plants.”

and this from "Prehistoric Dog Lovers Liked Seafood, Jewelry, Spirituality" by the same author (May 22, 2013):"

“‘Dog burials appear to be more common in areas where diets were rich in aquatic foods because these same areas also appear to have had the densest human populations and the most cemeteries,’ lead author Robert Losey, a University of Alberta anthropologist, told Discovery News.

“‘If the practice of burying dogs was solely related to their importance in procuring terrestrial game, we would expect to see them in the Early Holocene (around 9,000 years ago), when human subsistence practices were focused on these animals,’ Losey continued. ‘Further, we would expect to see them in later periods in areas where fish were never really major components of the diet and deer were the primary focus, but they are rare or absent in these regions.’”